Hello there, I’m in this rabbit hole of self hosting, but it’s just for me and my wife, mostly for me though.
I’ve put together on a broken laptop of 10yo, Ubuntu server 500gb (motherboard) + 2TB storage (DVD tray), CasaOS, Nextcloud, Immich and Plex.
I have a total of 300gb of photos and videos (including immich dB) , 50Gb of docs (including nextcloud dB), and everything else is disposable, like some movies.
I do not plan to have extra services, maybe a password manager.
In this black Friday I’ll buy a mini pc i5 and another 2TB drive to store zipped/encrypted backup files. And will most likely try proxmox there.
Now to the point, I’m seeing a lot people doing NAS separately, and some even putting things like Plex on the NAS server and not on the “main server”. And the question is, don’t I already have a NAS? My Ubuntu is sharing 2TB through the network, I’m configuring backups (with duplicati). What would I really gain if I buy a cheap synology NAS only for a shared folder? The mini pc I’ll buy with i5 16gb won’t do a better job than a cheap 1ghz 2mb memory NAS?
I hope I make sense, thanks in advance.
I mean, a NAS is literally Network Attached Storage. Your old laptop has storage and, presumably, is on the network; that’s a NAS.
The reason why people have standalone NAS boxes is because a laptop usually can’t hold all that much in the way of storage. My NAS has 42 TB of addressable storage; that’s not really viable on a laptop. Add in any form of redundancy (my 42 TB of storage comes from five hard drives), caching (32 GB of RAM helping with a read cache), or other services and people quickly outgrow a laptop or even a miniPC.
I’m generally of the camp that only have storage and storage-based services on my NAS, so the CPU of my NAS is super weak compared to my actual home server. There is a good chance the CPU in your laptop might be stronger than my NAS’s CPU even. Other people combine their NAS with their home server, needing a stronger CPU as a result.
As for why a prebuilt? Some people don’t want to delve into that and just want Storage That Works ™. I don’t dive into networking content all that much, hence a prebuilt router instead of something using opnSense or something. I’m happy playing around in the guts of a storage box (it really isn’t all that complicated), so I roll my own.
It sounds like a NAS product would be a waste of money for you.
The next step for you is adding more drives, setting up some sort of zfs or RAID array, and setting up automatic remote backups to somewhere like Backblaze.